Simply Junior

Thousands of new websites are created and uploaded every day. Even in small industries, new businesses are emerging every day. Even though the competition is increasing day by day, but should small business be really concerned with the growing number of websites? Internet provides information and it’s good to the information available in abundance, however, what a lot of websites lack is creativity and ability to attract their market. So, from this perspective, most businesses have nothing to worry about because their existing competitors and new entrepreneurs lack in creating effective web design for their business.

What a lot of businesses care about (when they create a new site) is that they want it to look good. They care about images, colors and the overall layout. They try to create a cool and nice atmosphere, but fail to realize that their websites must be practical and easily accessible instead of way too attractive.

Attractiveness won’t give you any benefit if people are unable to browse your website and find the information or products that they need. An effective websites focuses on usability along with having a nice and decent design. However, merely focusing on design is probably the biggest mistake a business can make.

See, you just don’t want people to come to your site and praise your design. You want them to get involved and then later take action as you like. To engage them and bring them back to your website, you need more than an attractive web design. What you need is an effective web design which is a combination of attractiveness, easy accessibility, simplicity and simple navigation. Otherwise, you won’t be able to have your visitors perform the action that you want and all your precious traffic will be a total waste for you and your business.

If you are unable to convert your visitors into customers, if you are unable to sell your products to the most relevant visitors, then it means your design is not effective and it’s not doing the job it is supposed to do.

It may be attractive, but it won’t, of course, pay your bills. A lot of designers, when they create new designs, don’t create about readability. They don’t care about the font size. Thus, with a weird and small font, they make it extremely difficult for the visitors to read the content. This is a very big mistake.

Your content must be easily readable and it should look neat and clean. The overall design may look good with small font, but you shouldn’t expect your market to read your content and take action. Another mistake that a lot of people make prevent their web design from becoming effective is that they create complex navigation. They make it extremely difficult (not on purpose of course) to browse the site and find the required products or information.

So, the bottom line is that your attractive web design may look good, but it may not help you convert your visitors and make money. Hence, it will actually be a bad design. Whereas, an effective web design looks nice and also allows visitors to browse the site easily and conveniently. Hence, an effective web design can convert more visitors. So, go for it and avoid creating a messy fish market.

It is an undisputed fact that market economies, in Capitalism, are moved by the supply and demand for goods and services. Whereas it is natural and obvious to explain and justify demand as a direct and proximate result of the need for goods and services, it is not quite equally so natural and obvious to explain and justify why such goods and services should be available for us to grab in the first place. Demand has to do with the way the intricate thread and connectivity of neurons in the human mind work – or don’t work. And since out of six billions or so humans there are six billions or so different minds, it follows that demand is a very subjective variable indeed. Supply, on the other hand, is in direct function and the proximate result of only one economic element: capital growth.

The basis for the real estate market is the demand by households, businesses, governments and institutions for space and shelter to conduct activities. Consequently, as demand changes in direct function of human activities and economic and demographic variables, conditions within the real estate market change. The demand for space, shelter and support for human activities is not for the land itself but, rather, for the use of the land – that is for the services provided by the land. Land that is useful has a value to the user. This value is the real motivating force for the operation of the real estate market.

More specifically, the value of land represents the amount a potential user is willing to pay in exchange for the right to use the land. From another perspective, it is the amount that the holder of the right to grant permission for the use of the land will receive in exchange for granting this right to another party. When there is no exchange, the holder receives value through his own use of the land. For example, a homeowner does not have to pay rent to live on the land. As the benefits from using land may be received long into the future, the value of an interest in land will be the dollar amount invested today that is justified by the anticipated benefits, given risk and current investment conditions. In general, any interest in land that has a value through use will also have a capital value. Value through use of land is possibly the only one precept – in the long and twisted line of thinking and rationalization of the human mind – that is common and shared by Marxism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism. The unreconcilable differences among these social doctrines, however, lie in the practical economic applications of the value through use of land as it relates to totalitarian regimes. On the other hand, value through use of land was absent during pre-industrial Mercantilism, as trade, tariffs and monopolies were given precedence over investment, free market and monetarism.

Housing supply is produced using land, labor, and various inputs such as electricity and building materials. The quantity of new supply is determined by the cost of these inputs, the price of the existing stock of houses, and the technology of production. In Economics, the price elasticity of supply measures the responsiveness of the quantity supplied of a good to its price. This responsiveness is measured as the percentage change in supply that occurs in response to a percentage change in price. As real estate is a fixed and durable commodity and the land underneath is practically indestructible, real estate markets are modeled as a stock-over-flow market. About 98 percent of supply consists of the stock of existing houses, while about 2 percent consists of the flow of new development. The stock of real estate supply in any period is determined by the existing stock in the previous period, the rate of deterioration of the existing stock, the rate of renovation of the existing stock, and the flow of new development in the current period.

Essentially, the production of real estate output depends on the accumulation of capital. This is so because the propensity to invest in production (construction of new inventories) depends a lot on expectations of future profitability and on the present perceptions of market risk. If production stops being perceived as profitable, or if the present perception of market risk increases sharply, capital will exit more and more from the sphere of real estate production. What drives the accumulation process, therefore, is the perpetual search for more surplus-value, that is the amount of the increase in the value of capital upon investment, i.e. the yield regardless of source or form. This requires a constant supply of a labor force which can conserve and add value to inputs and capital assets, and thus create a higher value. The rationale behind this is that labor adds value by satisfying demand through production, since when people acquire income they tend to invest it, and the more people that acquire income the more people that tend to invest it. Therefore, there is a correlation between capital and employment in real estate or, if you will, between income and labor. An increase in levels of consumption sets forth an increase in prices caused by a corresponding increase in demand, in itself generated by a commensurate increase in the income-employment factor. It follows, therefore, that growth is derived by the equilibrium of capital and investment with labor and employment. And since, furthermore, production is in direct function of consumers spending which increases as unemployment falls, it follows that capital accumulation inreases as employment rises and capital accumulation decreases as employment falls.

As capital accumulation in real estate is driven by surplus value as explained above, and because of the fact that it is not possible for employment to ever reach a ‘zero value’ in any economy (otherwise there is no economy), real estate capital growth will never stop accumulating and, therefore, demand for real estate outputs will always be there – even in the worst possible market. Real estate, therefore, is unique in this respect and quite unlike other markets that are not anchored on the relationship between capital and labor. These other markets are far more speculative in nature, in that future capital accumulation is fueled only by present capital consumption. As one thing undercuts the other, therefore, these speculative markets are more unstable, unsafe and prone to crash. What happened to the stock market on Black Monday – October 19, 1987 – when it lost twenty-two percent in value in eight hours is primary proof of it.

Luigi Frascati

Many people prefer forex scalping over swing or long term trading. They prefer the idea of being in and out the market seven or eight times a day, than having a sit and hold strategy. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, however you do have to make sure you know what you are doing before you start buying and selling like crazy.

For starters, when it comes to forex scalping, just like long term trading, it is very important that you trade with the trend. If you don’t, it’s like swimming against the current. Sure, you can get to where you want to go, however you’re only making it harder on yourself.

But when it comes to actually spotting the trend for forex scalping, I am one of those people that believe you are not going to find an indicator that is going to be able to tell you where the trend is. This has to come from you. You have to look at a chart and be able to properly analyze it.

Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as you may think it is. Just pull up your favorite indicator and start reading left to right like you would anything else. Which way is it going? Pull up different time frames and compare and contrast. Try to do this from a top-down perspective, where you are trying to find the longer term trends, so you can use that trend in the shorter term.

Forex scalping can be really tough if you are not looking at price action, as that is the key to any kind technical analysis. Don’t rely on a couple of Stochastics lines to do that for you.

“I only have a small business, I don’t need a budget.”

“I don’t have enough money to budget.”

For many small business owners, the word “budget” is something for the bigger company – maybe they’ll have one when their business “grows up.”

What is a Budget?

The simple explanation is a budget is a plan for how you will manage all financial resources and all expenses for your business. The basic equation that you want to demonstrate in a budget is as follows:

(estimated )Sales minus (estimated) Expenses = Profit (or loss)

How to create a Budget

If this is your first time to work on a budget for your small business, you might work from the perspective of having to list cost of goods or services plus all of your operating expenses to start the process.

How much does it take to operate your phone line? What is the cost of other utilities? How about the cost of a company vehicle, or what is the cost of transportation if you’re using your personal vehicle to also serve as a company vehicle. Do you need any supplies or inventory to operate your business? How about any employee payroll, payroll taxes or independent product or service providers? Remember to include everything you spend money on to operate your business even if you allocate some of the expenses to “petty cash” expenses, such as parking or bridge tolls while traveling to see clients.

I recommend that you create annual budget, as opposed to a monthly budget, so you can identify any expenses that you may have that come up only once or twice a year such as insurance and include them in your list of expenses. This allows you to amortize or spread the cost of this out over several months so that you can plan ahead for the expense.

As you work on your list of expenses keep in mind that these are the expenses that are necessary to operate your business. These should not be your “wish list” unless you want to budget in some expansion or growth. You may want to create a budget with just the necessities and another version of your budget with expansion expenses listed so that you can see the cost of both separately.

With a dollar figure to work with of your total expenses you are able to set the standard for or evaluate your sales figures. If you are new to your business you may need to use the dollar amount of your expenses to help you determine what your sales need to be in order to cover all costs and show a profit. If you have been in business for a while you can evaluate whether or not you are producing a profit by looking at historical sales figures.

As you conduct business during your budget year you should compare your actual income and spending with what you estimated. This will allow you to manage your spending so that you don’t over spend and cut into or eliminate your profits. You will also be able to see if sales have met expectations in order to cover expenses and still remain profitable.

Who should Budget?

Every small business owner should budget, no matter the size of business. I have heard some small business owners say their business is too small to budget, but that is not true. If you don’t have a written plan for what your financial obligations are and how your revenue will cover those obligations and leave some money unspent, then your business will never grow. In fact, you may out-spend your revenue and put yourself out of business.

Why Budget?

Budgeting for your small business gives you control over your finances. By looking ahead to what you know or can reasonably estimate what your expenses will be, you can then make financial decisions that will keep you from over-spending, or give you the freedom to invest in the growth of your business.

When Budget?

Every small business owner should have a budget to start their business and then review it annually. I recommend that small business owners review their budget several months before the end of their fiscal year. When I say review the budget I’m talking about comparing projected budget with actual. In the comparison you can see if your estimates were realistic. You and your CPA can also plan for last minute tax strategies, or plan to implement strategies in the up coming year’s budget.

The Goal in Budgeting

Remember, the goal of having a budget is to stay in control of your finances in advance. Setting the standard for your spending and revenue and having a tool to compare with actual will give you the control that you need to stay profitable. At the very least it will give you an indication of whether or not your business is actually profitable and not just busy.

Copyright 2005 Melody Campbell